How the "search this site..." really works?

Question

I'm a total newbie to Sharepoint (2010) so I apologize in advance for my newbie question.

I'm trying to figure out how exactly the out-of-the-box "search this site.." box (in a team site is supposed to work.

I've created an out of the box team site within my site collection. I have items on announcement list, some conversations on discussion board and a bunch of documents in shared documents library.

When I search using the search box on the ribbon "search this site..." I get forwarded to "_layouts/OSSSearchResults.aspx" which displays results. The problem is, while it does show results from lists (announcements, discussions, etc.) it does not show results from the document library.

For example, if I search with a document name (which I know exists in the library) I always get 0 results. It just won't find any documents. Why is this?

What settings (and from where) do I need to enable to get documents show up in the site search?

Thanks!

Answer 1

You should open the search administration from within the central administration. There you can check for any errors during the crawl ("Crawl Log" in the navigation).

Answer 2

Normally, all items should be returned. The contextual search works in a hierarchical way:

• site 1
• library 1
• • subsite 1.1
• • subsite 1.2

when the search has been exectued from subsite 1.1, results inside site1 and library 1 will not be included, only the data within subsite 1.1.

There are a few possiblities:

you added content, tried to search, but there was no content returned: * run a full crawl

You added content, ran a crawl, tried to search, no content was returned: * you do have a 0.x version checked in, which will not be crawled. Try to check it in to version 1.0 and crawl again.

Another possibility is that the account that you search with, doesn't have enough permissions to see the content.